Literary Birthday – 31 January – Laura Lippman

There’s always time to read. Don’t trust a writer who doesn’t read. It’s like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn’t eat.

All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.

Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

There’s a serendipity to real life that the Internet can’t duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it’s that book that changes your life.

Laura Lippman is an American author of detective fiction. Her novels have won the Edgar®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe, and Barry awards. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know.